Books Briefly
Books Briefly From the Soviet Underground SAMIZDAT REGISTER 2 edited by Roy Medvedev W.W. Norton. 323 pp. $24.95. Despite recent warnings from Soviet authorities, Roy Medvedev continues to edit...
...Three essays are by old Bolsheviks M. Bogin, M.P...
...Yakubovich, and A. Krasi-kov...
...Medvedev, a figure less appreciated in the United States than in Europe, exposes the resurgent Stalinism of the Brezhnev era and reviews the recent works by Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn...
...Despite recent warnings from Soviet authorities, Roy Medvedev continues to edit an underground Moscow journal called XXth Century...
...This new anthology contains a dozen provocative articles that submit Soviet history and economics to a Marxist critique...
...the last is a fascinating analysis of how the government reaps a tidy profit from its vodka monopoly, as the czars had done in their time...
...Spared the harsher punishments meted out to his ideological rivals in the dissident movement, Medvedev is far more sanguine about the fate of socialism in the Soviet Union...
...By granting freedom of speech and the press, the Soviet Union, says Medvedev, could "overcome all other shortcomings.1' Such optimism rests on the assumption—dubious in the light of the historical record—-that the Soviet leaders are democrats in wolves' clothing...
Vol. 47 • May 1983 • No. 6
